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The Country Wife

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Theatre

   William Wycherley in 1675.
   William Wycherley in 1675.

   The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written in 1675 by William
   Wycherley. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play
   reflects an aristocratic and anti- Puritan ideology, and was
   controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. Even
   its title contains a lewd pun. It is based on several plays by Molière,
   with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial
   prose dialogue in place of Molière's verse, a complicated, fast-paced
   plot tangle, and many sex jokes. It turns on two indelicate plot
   devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence in order to safely have
   clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an
   inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of
   town life, especially the fascinating London men.

   The scandalous trick and the frank language have for much of the play's
   history kept it off the stage and out of print. Between 1753 and 1924,
   The Country Wife was considered too outrageous to be performed at all
   and was replaced on the stage by David Garrick's cleaned-up and bland
   version The Country Girl, now a forgotten curiosity. The original play
   is again a stage favourite today, and is also acclaimed by academic
   critics, who praise its linguistic energy, sharp social satire, and
   openness to different interpretations.

Background

   Charles II was fond of Wycherley "upon account of his wit".
   Enlarge
   Charles II was fond of Wycherley "upon account of his wit".

   After the 18-year Puritan stage ban was lifted at the Restoration of
   the monarchy in 1660, the theatrical life of London recreated itself
   quickly and abundantly. During the reign of Charles II (1660–1685),
   playwrights such as John Dryden, George Etherege, Aphra Behn, and
   William Wycherley wrote comedies that triumphantly reassert
   aristocratic dominance and prestige after the years of middle class
   power during Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth. Reflecting the atmosphere
   of the Court, these plays celebrate a lifestyle of sexual intrigue and
   conquest, especially conquest that served to humiliate the husbands of
   the London middle classes and to avenge, in the sexual arena, the
   marginalization and exile suffered by royalists under Cromwell.
   Charles' personal interest in the stage nourished Restoration drama,
   and his most favoured courtiers were poets, playwrights, and men of
   wit, such as John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Charles Sackville, Earl of
   Dorset, and William Wycherley. Wycherley had no title or wealth, but
   had by 1675 already recommended himself by two well-received comedies
   and had been admitted to the inner circle, sharing the conversation and
   sometimes the mistresses of Charles, who "was extremely fond of him
   upon account of his wit". In 1675, at age 35 (at the time the portrait
   top right was painted), he created a sensation with The Country Wife,
   greeted as the bawdiest and wittiest play yet seen on the English
   stage.

   Like Charles II, Wycherley had spent some Commonwealth years in France
   and become interested in French drama, and throughout his short
   playwriting career (1671–1676) he would borrow plotlines and techniques
   from French plays, particularly Molière. However, in contrast to the
   French, English audiences of the 1670s had no enthusiasm for
   structurally simple comedies or for the neoclassical unities of time,
   place, and action, but demanded fast pace, lots of complications, and
   above all "variety". To achieve the much denser texture and more
   complex plotting that pleased in London, Wycherley would combine
   several source plays to produce bustling action and clashing moods,
   ranging from farce through paradox to satire.

   A Restoration novelty of which Wycherley took advantage was the
   readiness of public opinion to accept women on stage, for the first
   time in British history. Audiences were fascinated to see real women
   reverse the cross-dressing of the Elizabethan boy actors and appear in
   tight-fitting male outfits in the popular breeches roles, and to hear
   them match or even outdo the rake heroes in repartee and double
   entendre. Charles' choice of actresses as mistresses, notably Nell
   Gwyn, helped keep the interest fresh, and Wycherley plays on this
   interest in The Country Wife by having Mr. Pinchwife disguise his wife
   (the eponymous 'country wife') in a boy's outfit. It has also been
   suggested that he uses the allure of women on display to emphasize in
   an almost voyeuristic way Margery's provocative innocence, as well as
   the immodest knowingness of "town" wives like Lady Fidget.

Plots

   The first edition of The Country Wife.
   Enlarge
   The first edition of The Country Wife.

   The Country Wife is more neatly constructed than most Restoration
   comedies, but is typical of its time and place in having three sources
   and three plots. The separate plots are interlinked but distinct, each
   projecting a sharply different mood. They may be schematized as
   Horner's impotence trick, the married life of Pinchwife and Margery,
   and the courtship of Harcourt and Alithea.

   1. Horner's impotence trick provides the play's organizing principle
   and the turning-points of the action. The trick, to pretend impotence
   in order to be allowed where no complete man may go, is (distantly)
   based on the classic Roman comedy Eunuchus by Terence. The upper-class
   town rake Harry Horner mounts a campaign for seducing as many
   respectable ladies as possible and thus cuckolding or "putting horns
   on" their husbands: Horner's very name serves to alert the audience to
   what is going on. He spreads a false rumour of his own impotence, in
   order to convince married men that he can safely be allowed to
   socialize with their wives. The rumour is also meant to assist his mass
   seduction campaign by helping him identify women who are secretly eager
   for extramarital sex, because those women will react to a supposedly
   impotent man with tell-tale horror and disgust. This diagnostic trick,
   which invariably works perfectly, is one of The Country Wife's many
   running jokes at the expense of hypocritical upper-class women who are
   rakes at heart.

   Horner's ruse of impotence is a great success, and he has sex with many
   ladies of virtuous reputation, mostly the wives and daughters of
   citizens or "cits", i.e. upwardly mobile businessmen and entrepreneurs
   of the City of London, as opposed to the Town, the aristocratic
   quarters where Horner and his friends live. Three such ladies appear on
   stage, usually together: Lady Fidget, her sister-in-law Mrs Dainty
   Fidget, and her tag-along friend Mrs Squeamish—names that convey both a
   delicate sensitivity about the jewel of reputation, and a certain
   fidgety physical unease, or tickle—and the dialogue gives an indefinite
   impression of many more. The play is structured as a farce, driven by
   Horner's secret and by a succession of near-discoveries of the truth,
   from which he extricates himself by aplomb and good luck. A final
   hair-raising threat of exposure comes in the last scene, through the
   well-meaning frankness of the young country wife Margery Pinchwife.
   Margery is indignant at the accusations of impotence directed at "poor
   dear Mr. Horner", which she knows from personal experience to be
   untrue, and is intent on saying so at the traditional end-of-the-play
   public gathering of the entire cast. In a final trickster masterpiece,
   Horner averts the danger, joining forces with his more sophisticated
   lovers to persuade the jealous Pinchwife to at least pretend to believe
   Horner impotent and his own wife still innocent. Horner never becomes a
   reformed character but is assumed to go on reaping the fruits of his
   planted misinformation, past the last act and beyond.

   2. The married life of Pinchwife and Margery is based on Molière's
   School For Husbands (1661) and School For Wives (1662). Pinchwife is a
   middle-aged man who has married an ignorant country girl in the hope
   that she will not know to cuckold him. However, Horner teaches her, and
   Margery cuts a swathe through the complexities of London upper-class
   marriage and seduction without even noticing them. Restoration comedies
   often contrast town and country for humorous effect, and this is one
   example of it. Both Molière in the School For Wives and Wycherley in
   The Country Wife get a lot of comic business out of the meeting
   between, on the one hand, innocent but inquisitive young girls and, on
   the other hand, the sophisticated 17th-century culture of sexual
   relations which they encounter. The difference, which would later make
   Molière acceptable and Wycherley atrocious to 19th-century critics and
   theatre producers, is that Molière's Agnes is naturally pure and
   virtuous, while Margery is just the opposite: enthusiastic about the
   virile handsomeness of town gallants, rakes, and especially theatre
   actors, she keeps Pinchwife in a state of continual horror with her
   plain-spokenness and her interest in sex. A running joke is the way
   Pinchwife's pathological jealousy always leads him into supplying
   Margery with the very type of information he wishes her not to have.

   3. The courtship of Harcourt and Alithea is a conventional love story
   without any direct source. By means of persistence and true love,
   Horner's friend Harcourt wins the hand of Pinchwife's sister Alithea,
   who is when the play opens engaged to the foppish Sparkish. The delay
   mechanism of this story is that the upright Alithea holds fast
   virtuously to her engagement to Sparkish, even while his stupid and
   cynical character unfolds to her. It is only after Alithea has been
   caught in a misleadingly compromising situation with Horner, and
   Sparkish has doubted her virtue while Harcourt has not, that she
   finally admits her love for Harcourt.

Key scenes

   Notorious scenes in the play include "the china scene", a sustained
   double entendre dialogue mostly heard from off stage, where Horner is
   purportedly discussing his china collection with two of his lady
   friends. The husband of Lady Fidget and the grandmother of Mrs.
   Squeamish are listening front stage and nodding in approval, failing to
   pick up the double meaning which is obvious to the audience. Lady
   Fidget has already explained to her husband that Horner "knows china
   very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I
   should beg some. But I will find it out, and have what I came for yet"
   (IV.iii.110). Dialogue such as this made "china" a dirty word in common
   conversation, Wycherley later claimed.

   In another famous scene Lady Fidget's self-styled "virtuous gang" meet
   up at Horner's lodging to carouse, throw off their public virtue, and
   behave exactly like male rakes, singing riotous songs and drinking
   defiant toasts. Finally each of the ladies triumphantly declares that
   Horner himself is the very lover they have been toasting, and a mayhem
   of jealousy breaks out as they realize that their friends have also
   been receiving Horner's favours. But they quickly realize they have no
   choice but to keep the scandalous secret: "Well then, there's no
   remedy, sister sharers, let us not fall out, but have a care of our
   honour" (V.iv.169).

   A scene of the Pinchwife plot that combines farce and nightmare is
   Pinchwife's attempt to force Mrs Pinchwife to write a haughty farewell
   letter to Horner, using the Freudian threat to "write whore with this
   penknife in your face" (IV.ii.95). Like all Pinchwife's efforts it
   misfires, giving Mrs Pinchwife instead an opportunity to send Horner a
   fan letter.

First performance

   The Country Wife was first performed in January 1675, by the King's
   Company, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This luxurious playhouse,
   designed by Christopher Wren and with room for 2000 spectators, had
   opened only the year before. It was of compact design, retaining in
   spite of its large seating capacity much of the intimate actor/audience
   contact of the Elizabethan theatre, still with an almost
   Elizabethan-size forestage or apron stage, on which actors would come
   forward for maximum audience contact.

   The original cast was listed in the first edition of The Country Wife,
   as was standard practice, and modern scholars have suggested that this
   information throws light on Wycherley's intentions. Wycherley wrote
   with the original actors in mind, tailoring the roles to their
   strengths. Also, since the audience consisted mostly of habitual
   playgoers, authors and directors could use the associations of an
   actor's previous repertoire to enrich or undercut a character, effects
   familiar on television and in the cinema today.

   Several of the actors were specialised comedians, notably Joseph Haines
   who played the false-wit character Sparkish, Alithea's original fiancé.
   At the outset of his high-profile career as comedian and song-and-dance
   man, young Haines already had a reputation for eccentricity and
   dominant stage presence, suggesting that Sparkish is not merely a comic
   butt for the truewits Horner, Harcourt, and Dorilant to mock, but also
   a real threat to the romance of Harcourt and Alithea.
   Harcourt: Edward Kynaston played female roles in the 1660s.
   Enlarge
   Harcourt: Edward Kynaston played female roles in the 1660s.

   Pinchwife was played by the elderly Michael Mohun, who was best known
   for playing menacing villains, such as Volpone and Iago. Mrs. Pinchwife
   was Elizabeth Boutell or Bowtel, a young actress who had "a childish
   look. Her voice was weak, tho' very mellow; she generally acted the
   young innocent lady whom all the heroes are mad in love with".
   Boutell's previous recorded roles had in fact all been unmarried as
   well as innocent girls, and Margery was her first married role.
   Matching Boutell and Mohun as a couple would emphasize "her youth and
   innocence against Mohun's age and violence". The other husband to be
   cuckolded by Horner, Sir Jaspar Fidget, was played by another elderly
   actor, William Cartwright, best known for comic parts such as Falstaff.
   This casting suggests that Sir Jaspar was played as a straightforwardly
   comic part, while Pinchwife would be "alarming as well as funny".

   The male leads Horner and Harcourt were played by the contrasted actors
   Charles Hart and Edward Kynaston (or Kenaston). The forcefully
   masculine 45-year-old Hart "was celebrated for superman roles, notably
   the arrogant, bloodthirsty Almanzor in John Dryden's Conquest of
   Granada", and also for playing rakish comedy heroes with nonchalance
   and charisma. Many critics credit the personalities and skills of Hart
   and Nell Gwyn with creating, as much as any playwright did, the famous
   flirting/bantering Restoration comedy couple. The beautiful androgynous
   Kynaston, probably in his early thirties, was a different kind of hero.
   He had started his career in 1660 as the outstanding Restoration female
   impersonator—"the prettiest woman in the whole house"—before real women
   entered the profession in 1662. (The 2004 movie Stage Beauty is loosely
   based on Kynaston's career.)

   John Harold Wilson (Wilson 1969) argues that the famously virile stage
   presence of Hart as Horner must be taken into account when interpreting
   the play: as personified by Hart, Horner will have won women not so
   much through clever trickery as "the old-fashioned way", by being
   "dangerously attractive", and it is only fools like Sir Jaspar Fidget
   who really believe him harmless. Harcourt/Kynaston, although by 1675 a
   well-regarded and skilful actor of male roles, would clearly have been
   overshadowed by Horner/Hart. The actresses associated with each hero
   must also have tended to make the Horner plot more striking on the
   stage than the true-love plot: Horner's primary mistress Lady Fidget,
   spokeswoman for "the virtuous gang" of secretly sex-hungry town wives,
   was played by the dynamic Elizabeth Knepp, who Samuel Pepys declared
   "the most excellent, mad-humoured thing, and sings the noblest I've
   ever heard", talents that the famous drinking scene in Horner's lodging
   seems designed to do justice to. By contrast, the choice of the
   bit-part actress Elizabeth James as Alithea would have de-emphasized
   the Harcourt-Alithea plot. Such historical considerations have made
   modern critics sceptical of Norman Holland's classic 1959 "right
   way/wrong way" interpretation of the play, which positions the
   true-love plot as the most important one (compare section "Modern
   criticism" below).

Stage history

   The play had a good initial run, although Horner's trick and the
   notorious china scene immediately raised offense. Wycherley laughed off
   such criticisms in his next play, The Plain Dealer (1676), where he has
   the hypocritical Olivia exclaim that the china scene in The Country
   Wife "has quite taken away the reputation of poor china itself, and
   sullied the most innocent and pretty furniture of a lady's chamber".
   Olivia's sensible cousin Eliza insists that she'll go see The Country
   Wife anyway: "All this will not put me out of conceit with china, nor
   the play, which is acted today, or another of the same beastly
   author's, as you call him, which I'll go see." Writing himself into The
   Plain Dealer as the "beastly author" of the china scene, Wycherley
   seems more amused than repentant. The Country Wife did in fact survive
   the complaints to become a dependable repertory play from 1675 till the
   mid-1740s, but by then public taste had changed too much to put up with
   the sex jokes any longer. Its last 18th-century performance in 1753 was
   followed by a hiatus of 171 years, until the successful Phoenix Society
   production in 1924 at the Regent Theatre in London. The first-ever
   American performance of Wycherley's original Country Wife took place in
   1931.

   During its long banishment from the stage, The Country Wife continued a
   shadowy existence in the form of David Garrick's cleaned-up version The
   Country Girl (1766), where Margery is a virgin and Horner her romantic
   lover. This play was very popular, going through at least twenty
   editions, reaching the New York stage in 1794, and surviving in both
   London and New York into the 20th century. The few modern critics who
   have read Garrick's version typically dismiss it as "sentimental and
   boring, where The Country Wife is astringent and provocative".
   Wycherley's original is now again a stage classic, with countless
   professional and amateur performances, an actors' favourite because of
   the high number of good parts it offers. The movie Shampoo (1975), with
   Warren Beatty as the Horner character, is a somewhat distant version of
   The Country Wife after exactly 300 years, reportedly inspired by the
   Chichester Festival production of 1969 .

Critical history

   Thomas Macaulay abhorred Wycherley.
   Thomas Macaulay abhorred Wycherley.

   From its creation until the mid-20th century, The Country Wife was
   subject to both aesthetic praise and moral outrage. Many critics
   through the centuries have acknowledged its linguistic energy and wit,
   including even Victorians such as Leigh Hunt, who praised its literary
   quality in a selection of Restoration plays that he published in 1840
   (itself a daring undertaking, for reputedly "obscene" plays that had
   been long out of print). However, in an influential review of Hunt's
   edition, Thomas Babington Macaulay swept aside questions of literary
   merit, claiming with indignation that "Wycherley's indecency is
   protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the
   hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle and too noisome
   even to approach." Margery Pinchwife, regarded in Wycherley's own time
   as a purely comic character, was denounced by Macaulay as a scarlet
   woman who threw herself into "a licentious intrigue of the lowest and
   least sentimental kind".
   Leigh Hunt admired Wycherley.
   Enlarge
   Leigh Hunt admired Wycherley.

   It was Macaulay, not Hunt, who set the keynote for the 19th century.
   The play was impossible equally to stage and to discuss, forgotten and
   obscure. The puritanical George Bernard Shaw dismissed Restoration
   comedy wholesale as simply vile. The hugely knowledgeable drama critic
   Max Beerbohm tells a self-deprecating story of how he embarrassed
   himself on a visit to Swinburne by confusing an extremely rare
   Elizabethan play, The Country Wench, which Swinburne was eager to show
   him, with "a play called The Country Wife by—wasn't it Wycherley? I had
   once read it—or read something about it...."

   Academic critics of the first half of the 20th century continued to
   approach The Country Wife gingerly, with frequent warnings about its
   "heartlessness", even as they praised its keen social observation. At
   this time nobody found it funny, and positive criticism tried to rescue
   it as satire and social criticism rather than as comedy. Macaulay's
   "licentious" Mrs. Pinchwife becomes in the 20th century a focus for
   moral concern: to critics such as Bonamy Dobrée, she is a tragic
   character, destined to have her naiveté cruelly taken advantage of by
   the "grim, nightmare figure" of Horner.

Modern criticism

   The past fifty years have seen a major change, and academic critics
   have acknowledged the play as a powerful and original work. Norman
   Holland's widely influential proposal in 1959 of a "right way/wrong
   way" reading took Wycherley's morality with innovative seriousness and
   interpreted the play as presenting two bad kinds of masculinity,
   Horner's libertinism and Pinchwife's possessiveness, and recommending
   the golden mean of Harcourt, the true lover, the representative of
   mutual trust in marriage. A competing milestone approach of the same
   generation is that of Rose Zimbardo (1965), who discusses the play in
   generic and historical terms as a fierce social satire.

   Both these types of reading have now fallen out of favour; there is
   little consensus about the meaning of The Country Wife, but its
   "notorious resistance to interpretation" (Burke, 239) is having an
   invigorating rather than damping effect on academic interest. The
   play's ideological dimension has been emphasized recently. It was
   written by a courtier for a courtly and aristocratic audience, and
   Douglas Canfield has pointed to an unusual complication for a courtly
   play: Horner's acts of cuckolding aggression are directed not only at
   disrupting middle-class families of "the City", in the usual way of the
   aristocratic Restoration rake, but also at his own, upper, class, the
   inhabitants of "the Town"—the new and fashionable quarters (the future
   West End) that had sprung up west of the medieval City walls after the
   Great Fire of London in 1666. The courtier code proposed by Wycherley
   is of a sexual game. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued in Between Men
   that the game is played not between men and women, but between men by
   means of women, who are merely the "conduits" of homosocial desire
   between men. The hierarchy of wits meant that the wittiest and most
   virile man would win at the game. Thus Horner, as Canfield puts it,
   "represents not just class superiority, but that subset of class
   represented by the Town wits, a privileged minority that ... is the jet
   set identified with the Town and the Court as the loci of real power in
   the kingdom." The aggressive attack mounted in the china scene against
   the class and the generation by which Wycherley was patronized with the
   expectation that he would defend it (against Sir Jaspar Fidget and Lady
   Fidget), suggests Canfield, would only let an audience of that class
   laugh comfortably if Horner were punished by actual impotence in the
   end, which he is not. "When the play concludes with no poetical justice
   that makes Horner really impotent", writes Canfield, "leaving him
   instead potent and still on the make, the audience laughs at its own
   expense: the women of quality nervously because they have been
   misogynistically slandered; the men of quality nervously because at
   some level they recognize that class solidarity is just a pleasing
   fiction".
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